Dr. H. Gilbert Welch is an academic physician, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, and a nationally recognized expert on the effects of medical testing. He sees the value of medical care, particularly in those who are acutely ill or injured. But in many other settings, we have exaggerated the benefits of medical care and understated its harms. In this video, Dr. Welch examines some widely held assumptions about the value of medical care.

This is an initial description of the mini empathic design workshop that Edwin Rutsch, director of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy is prototyping and testing. We are inviting a select group of people who have a proven background and interest in design or empathy to take part.

Participants: 4 to 5 per workshop Time Required: 3 hours Dates/Times: Various dates and time during the coming months. Location: Meet Online Using Google Hangouts. Recording: The call is recorded for educational purposes. No cost to take part in the testing phase.

Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

Empathy

“I can’t come up with any new ideas if all I do is exist in my own life.”

Empathy is the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their perspectives.

Human-centered design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. All you have to do empathize, understand them, and bring them along with you in the design process.

Qmed (formerly Medical Device Link) is the world's first completely prequalified supplier directory and news source for medical device OEMs. Find medical device suppliers and IVD suppliers who are FDA-registered, ISO 13485- and ISO 9001-certified. Qmed is also the home of Medical Product Manufacturing News and the most relevant breaking news for the medical device industry.

Cornell University engineers have created a functional, synthetic immune organ that produces antibodies and can be controlled in the lab, completely separate from a living organism. The engineered organ has implications for everything from rapid production of immune therapies to new frontiers in cancer ...

The question about how art and science interact, and if art is an integrated part of scientific work, or should be banned from science, leads us back to discussions of the ancient Greek philosophers and their precursors. The fundamental question was: What is reality? Can we understand the world around us with the help of our senses, or is the world around us a product of our mental concepts? The answers to these questions never were straightforward, and have been heavily discussed during the last 2000 years. During the different periods of history, sometimes it was en vogue to believe that reality is defined by our senses (materialism) other times people preferred to believe that reality is mental (idealism).

The concept of idealism was profoundly formulated for the first time by Plato (428/7 - 348/7 BC). Later it was enlivened by different Neo-Platonic movements. E.g. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 –1519), a follower of Neo-Platonism, did not make a clear distinction between art and science. If the reality of the world basically is a mental product, all mental products including art, play an as equally important role.

Idealistic scientific thinking fell out of favor by the end of the nineteenth century. The main paradigm was now materialism. Idealistic thinking was highly criticized as unscientific. The external world and its observation by experiments became the main subject of science. Reflection about how our brain is structuring the world, and its meaning for scientific discovery were excluded from scientific methodology. Materialistic, scientific approach survived as a leading paradigm until today. Such materialistic orientated science banned art and artistic thinking from science. Art was viewed as a separate area, which could not give valuable contributions to scientific discovery.

However, a number of twentieth century scientists are known to have concerned themselves with Neo-Platonic, artistic thinking, such as earlier described in e.g. Goethes (1749 – 1832) theory of color, a theory focused on the mental reception of color. Among these modern scientists are the logician and mathematician Kurt Goedel (1906 - 1978), the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) the mathematical physicist and pioneer of chaos theory Mitchell Feigenbaum (born 1944), to mention a few. Feigenbaum has even said, “Goethe was right about color”! All the above-mentioned use mathematics as their scientific tool. Only mathematics and mathematical logic survived as a respectable science as the paradigm changed to materialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Mathematics is a product of our brain and thus conceptually idealistic. On first sight a modern eye will often judge idealistic concepts as quite fantastic, naive, strange and far away from all reality. A modern scientist would use exactly these descriptions hearing what Plato claims in his Timaeus; the world is built out of triangles. However, this becomes less suspicious, if one stops to focus on the triangles and starts to reflect over the basic idea behind this concept. In modern theoretical physics we can find such thinking. In quantum theory, as an example, a mathematical model is used to describe the material world of atoms. The Schrödinger equation plays a central role in this theory. The sine function stands central in the solution of this equation. The sine is a function of an angle in the right triangle. So even with his triangles Plato might not have been so wrong and naive as it initially may look.

Neo-Platonic thinking in science again became acceptable during the last decades. E.g. Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964, an American mathematician) reintroduced the concept self-organization in 1965 in the second edition of his "Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" During the years following this publication, the concept of self-organization became popular among scientist working in the field of complex systems. The work of Wiener was influential for the development and understanding of scientific concepts about complex systems. These concepts play an important role in modern scientific movements such as systems biology and synthetic biology.

Conceptual thinking plays an important role in the contemporary design and art movements. A new intersection between science and art is taking place, since scientific thinking is re-opened for such idealistic concepts. In the following years it will be interesting to see how design and art will influence the development of the field of synthetic biology and vice versa.

“ Mood disorders such as depression are devastating to sufferers, and hugely costly to treat. The most severe form of depression, often called clinical depression or major depressive disorder (MDD), increases the person’s likelihood of suicide and contributes significantly to a person’s disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), a measure of quality of life taking into account periods of incapacity. The healthcare burden of MDD is large in most countries, especially when the person requires a stay in hospital. Putting these factors together, it’s clear we need to develop effective treatments to combat depression. The mechanisms of depressive disorders are not well understood, and it seems likely that there is no single cause. Most modern therapies use drugs that target neurotransmitters – the chemicals that carry signals between neurons. For example, the class of drugs known as SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, prevent the neurotransmitter serotonin from being reabsorbed by a neuron; this means that more serotonin is available to wash around between the nerve cells, and is more likely to activate cells in the brain networks that area affected in MDD.”
Via Wildcat2030

“ "The result is that a DNA sequence can be made in the form of a clam, for example, and containing a drug. The DNA molecule, however, contains a code activated upon encountering certain materials in the body. For example, the clam can be designed to change its shape and release the drug only when it meets a cancer cell or the right tissue.”
Via Andrew Spong

A collaborative project between the University of Leeds and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is bringing together music psychologist Dr Alinka Greasley and Dr Harriet Crook, Lead Clinical Scientist for Complex Hearing Loss, to investigate how music listening experiences are affected by deafness, hearing impairments and the use of hearing aids.

“ Nature invented software billions of years before we did. “The origin of life is really the origin of software,” says Gregory Chaitin (inventor of mathematical metabiology). Life requires what software does. It is fundamentally algorithmic. And its complexity needs better thinking tools.”
Via Beste Ozcan

“ A host of supersmart, self-healing technologies could someday make “normal wear and tear” a bygone expense. By definition, these materials—either intrinsically or with the aid of an outside agent—can mend broken molecular bonds without human intervention. When scientists created the first thermoset elastomer that could repair itself at room temperature without a catalyst, in 2013, they made history. Dubbed “The Terminator”, after the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger films, this advanced polymer and other self-healing materials provide a glimpse into the future of industrial design.”
Via Wildcat2030

When considering how to design products, teams or even common everyday household objects, empathy often doesn't end up on the required features list.

Yet, without empathy, teams with enormous technical skills can fail in their quest to deliver quality products to their users. Incredible projects fail to create communities because they don't exercise it. Fail at empathy and your chances of failing at everything skyrocket.

“We often think of the everyday materials we use to build our human world as static, but we should think again: MIT's Self-Assembly Lab programs such materials to transform themselves to handle tasks more simply and efficiently, thus improving or...”

- EMPATHY DEFINITION - DOES EVERYONE HAVE EMPATHY? - LACK OF EMPATHY – NARCISSISTS, AUTISM, AND BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER - WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMPATHY, SYMPATHY, COMPASSION, AND LOVE? - WHAT ARE BENEFITS OF EMPATHY? - ARE YOU AN EMPATH? - 5 TIPS: HOW TO STAY OPEN AND NOT GET OVERWHELMED AS AN EMPATH - EMPATHY IN THE DIGITAL AGE - HOW DO YOU LEARN EMPATHY? - UNDERSTANDING YOUR EMOTIONS - WHAT ARE THE GIFTS ABOUT EMOTIONS? - HOW TO CHANGE HOW WE RELATE TO NEGATIVE EMOTIONS? - WHAT ARE YOUR EMOTIONS AND HOW ARE THEY INTERRELATED? - WHY DO WE HAVE EMOTIONS? - PROCESS FOR UNDERSTANDING OUR EMOTIONS - A COGNITIVE APPROACH IN UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS
Via Edwin Rutsch

I was recently blind for five minutes and felt as though my eyes had never been more open. I didn't have some freak accident or momentary medical issue; I was participating in a mini human-centered design challenge at an event hosted byIDEO.org and NY+Acumen to introduce basic concepts of human-centered design.

“In addition to putting humans at the center of product and systems design, we need to bring back human-centered community.”

The immersion process of human-centered design enables empathy, which as Reboot, the social impact design firm says, "enables the insights that drive breakthrough solutions;" but it also enables happiness, personal fulfillment and a greater sense of community.

So why not put ourselves in the shoes of our friends, families and communities and bring empathy and humanity back to the center of our products, services and personal connections?

Every year, an estimated 1.2 to 2 billion tons of food is wasted—a massive amount of food that, if saved, would be more enough to feed the world’s hungry. Food waste isn’t just a humanitarian issue however; the problem is also a waste of land, water, energy and money. To put food wastage in perspective, Arbtech created an infographic that points out some of the world’s worst offenders and explains how food loss occurs throughout the supply chain. Click through to learn more about food waste and, most importantly, what you can do to help.

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